“I wish they’d show the Beatles,” my mother said. “Paul was my favorite.”
“I remember.”
We were both sitting on the couch, her legs stretched over my lap. “I have bad arthritis in my feet,” she said. “They hurt a lot, and they’re stiff as boards. They’re practically useless.” She wiggled her toes.
“Do you remember Bumpa’s foot rubs?” she asked. “He had healing hands.”
“Would you like a little foot rub?” I asked.
We listened to the Dave Clark Five and Petula Clark and the Byrds while I massaged her tired, worn-out feet. “It’s just like the old days, isn’t it?” she said. “I miss them.”
My mother needed new sneakers, so the following day, Lee and I took her to the New Balance factory outlet, which is in Lawrence, across from the former textile mills. The “Big Ben” tower clock that had stopped running in the 1950s was restored in the 1990s and now keeps accurate time. New Balance claims to be one of the few companies committed to the domestic shoe business, but more and more of its products are being manufactured in Asia. My mother didn’t care where they were made; she only cared that New Balance would restore her old balance.
“If I can only find the right pair, I know I’ll be fine,” she told me. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that sneakers wouldn’t correct her balance or reset the clock. The parking lot was on a steep incline, so Lee dropped us off while he parked the car. After we helped her into the store, we found the 8½ medium section. Since it was a factory outlet, we had to fend for ourselves. My mother sat down on a bench, while I pulled out various models, which she rejected for multiple reasons. “I am not a teenager, Patricia,” she said. “Can you imagine me in orange? Or lime? No, I want something subdued.”
“Like gray?” I asked.
“Gray? Ugh! Too depressing. I’m not in the grave yet.”
“I have the same pair, and I like them.”
“You have your father’s feet. Very narrow.”
“But these come in medium.”
She turned up her nose. “I don’t like gray.”
I found another pair, gray and pale blue. “What do you think?” I asked. At this point, Lee had disappeared into the men’s department. He is the most patient man I have ever met, but even he has his limits.
My mother made a face. I convinced her to try them on. They were too big. She tried on a smaller pair. They were too small. We tried on at least six different pairs in various sizes, colors, and styles. Finally, she found a pair she liked. I suggested that she walk in them to make sure they fit properly. “I am not using my cane,” she said defiantly. “Remember, I used to go to Silver Sneakers.” She was referring to an exercise program for older adults that she’d attended fifteen years earlier. I helped her walk up and down the aisle. She was pretty sure they fit. I was worried about the “pretty sure” part, but we’d already gone through all the sneakers in her size.
“I’m delighted with them,” she announced back in the car. “I’m so glad you came with me. I would never be able to do this myself. The incline in the parking lot is treacherous. I’d probably kill myself. But these are perfect. Thank you, Patricia and Lee. Now I won’t have to use my cane.”
Back in New York, I called my mother. “So, how are the sneakers?”
“I brought them back. They didn’t fit, and I didn’t like the colors.”
“You walked from the parking lot to the store? You said it was treacherous! You said it could kill you!”
“Those sneakers would have killed me. Anyway, you’ll be happy to know I bought the gray ones.”
I gently suggested that maybe my mother should stop driving and hire someone to help her do the food shopping and errands.
“If I can’t drive, that’s it for me,” she said. “You expect me to be stuck in the house all day long? I’ll go crazy. I love getting outside and walking places. Take that away from me, and it’s over.”
Her favorite destination was Whole Foods, where she worked the system like a pro. First, she parked in the handicapped spot and then got her cane from the backseat and walked to the shopping carts, which were usually in front. Once she steadied herself with a cart, she was all set. There were always “kind” people ready to help, probably because they couldn’t believe someone that old and frail was walking around a warehouse-size supermarket on her own. Every day I expected to receive a call from someone at Whole Foods telling me she’d collapsed near the kale chips.
The following September, my mother did indeed fall—not at Whole Foods but nearer to home, more specifically, at the bird feeder. She claimed she was trying to fill it with birdseed, though I suspected she was attempting to grease the pole to keep the white squirrels away. Since my father couldn’t hear her cries for help, she crawled the whole length of the backyard to attract his attention. She had to move quickly to avoid the sprinkler system, which was timed to go on. When my father saw her on the ground, he immediately called 911 and an ambulance took her to the local hospital. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, but given her age—she was about to turn ninety-three—they wanted to keep her overnight for more tests the next morning. Nancy drove from Boston to stay with my father. Around three A.M., my mother decided she’d had enough of the hospital and demanded to be let out. Remarkably, given the liability issues, they actually released her in the middle of the night and an ambulance brought her home. When she got there, she discovered that she didn’t have her house keys. My father had removed his hearing aids and Nancy is a heavy sleeper, so nobody heard the doorbell. My quick-thinking mother convinced the EMS workers to get a ladder from the garage and then climb up to the roof, where they had to remove an air-conditioner to gain entrance through a second-story window. Nancy woke up to find two strange men in the hallway and screamed.
When my mother told me the story, I said, “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard. You should have stayed in the hospital.”
“I didn’t want to be in the hospital. I wanted to be home. The only way they’re going to take me out is feetfirst.”
We hired a home-care attendant against my parents’ strenuous objections. My mother hated having someone else in the house, but it was clear she needed help with errands. She continued to complain that she was tired, but with her insomnia, it was hard to know if she wasn’t getting enough sleep or if it was more serious. Though I’d begged her not to do it, she’d renewed her driver’s license, but she didn’t feel well enough to drive or even accompany the attendant to Whole Foods or to her hairdresser’s. The only thing she cared about was Thanksgiving. Emily and her family had promised to come home, and my mother was looking forward to finally seeing everyone together at the table.
Two days before the holiday, she was taken to the emergency ward again, this time with an excruciating headache. Or was it eye pain? It was hard to keep up with the ever-shifting complaints. The doctors at the hospital diagnosed congestive heart disease, and she was sent to a nearby nursing home for rehabilitation. Coincidentally, it was the same place where Priscilla Lane, the movie star and mother of the girl with the white Mary Janes, had spent her final years.
On Thanksgiving, everyone was at the dining room table, except my mother. I sat in her chair, propping up her driver’s license against a candlestick so she’d be present in spirit.
The following morning, Lee and I brought my father over to visit her. Since he rarely left his reading chair, it was difficult for him to move, and we were nervous that he’d slip and fall. We helped him to the door of the nursing home, where we’d arranged for a wheelchair. When he saw my mother being wheeled out of her room, his green eyes lit up with such love I had to hold back tears. I’d never seen that expression before, or maybe I’d just never looked hard enough for it. We took them both into a private room, where they sat side by side and held hands. My father kept moving his wheelchair back and forth, as if on a first date and he d
idn’t know what to say.
Back home, my father showed me the blue-and-white Victorian figurine of a little boy that sat on a side table next to the couch. It had been there forever, but I’d never really noticed it. My father explained that before he was sent away to boarding school, the landlady at the rooming house where he lived with his father told him he could select one thing to keep him company. He picked the little boy and somehow managed to hold on to it for the next eighty-five years. “Look over there,” he said, pointing to a blue-and-white little girl figurine. Again, it was one of those objects that had always been next to the couch but that I’d never paid any attention to. He told me that when he first met my mother, it was the first thing he noticed in her apartment. The little girl was the perfect match to the little boy.
My mother spent the next several weeks in the nursing home, trying to regain her strength. She pushed as hard as she could in physical therapy, but she hated the place, complaining that the aides were rough and the food terrible. Once, after an aide yelled at her for pressing the call button too many times, both Nancy and I were on the phone with the social worker and nursing station. Another time an aide upbraided her for not making it to the bathroom on time. It was humiliating for my proud mother, and once again, we spoke to the staff, but it didn’t seem to matter. Though we explained that my mother didn’t like eggs, they persisted in serving them to her. Deciding that she was dehydrated, they put her on an IV drip and in the process managed to blow a vein, causing blood to leak out. I was the one who noticed that her arm, with its paper-thin skin, was all swollen.
There were a few bright spots. One day she received a bunch of tulips from my friend Robin. Steffi had introduced us right before she’d died, making a point of telling me, “You two should become friends.” It was if she’d willed her to me, and we did indeed become close. My mother had always loved flowers, and as the tulips opened up and changed shape, she found them mesmerizing. “These are simply the most beautiful flowers I’ve ever seen,” she told me. “I could watch them for hours.”
She spent much of the day sleeping, however, and after she told me she’d had a dream of walking through her childhood home, I began to get nervous. I knew that such dreams are common at the end of life. “Mom, you don’t think you’re dying, do you?” I asked hesitantly. She immediately turned into her old self. “Patricia, how could you ask such a question? Of course I’m not dying. Really! You always have to make such a big deal out of things.”
A few days before Christmas, Lee and I drove to Andover to bring my mother back home. The nurses and social worker gave out very little information on her progress, and the doctor didn’t return calls. When we went to see her, one of the attendants called me aside. “I shouldn’t be saying this,” she whispered. “But you really should get her out of here. She’s not improving at all. All she does is sleep.”
“We’re bringing her home,” I explained. “That’s why we’re here.”
It took several days for the paperwork to be processed before my mother could be released, so Lee and I bought a tree and decorated it with all her favorite ornaments.
We hung the mantelpiece decoration Bumpa had made fifty years earlier; he’d cut out little angels, choirboys, and snowmen from pieces of colored felt, gluing sequins for eyes. We put a Christmas wreath on the front door, white poinsettias around the fireplace, and arranged to have the tree in front of the house outlined in white lights. It had snowed recently and, to use one of my mother’s favorite expressions, it looked just like “a winter wonderland.” My parents were about to celebrate their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary on December 27. It had snowed on that day too, as it had on my wedding, and at Bumpa’s funeral, and on the days Nancy and I were born.
The morning we were scheduled to pick her up, we got a call from someone at the nursing home. There was a bad virus going around and my mother had caught it. “You shouldn’t come over,” the woman said. “It’s too contagious.”
Lee and I went anyway. I have never seen anyone as sick as my mother. All I could do was hold her. In the hallway, I passed the attendant who’d advised me to get my mother out of the place; she gave me a sympathetic glance and then quickly looked away.
Several days later, we returned to New York, where we’d planned a Christmas dinner for Lee’s family. His ninety-one-year-old mother had just been diagnosed with lung cancer and was scheduled for surgery in mid-January. On Christmas Eve, I caught the nursing home virus and spent Christmas in bed. Lee carried the turkey and the rest of the food over to his mother’s apartment. I was sick for the next ten days and couldn’t imagine how my mother had survived the illness.
Finally, on a wintry January morning, we hired an ambulance to bring my mother home. I’d made sure to keep all the decorations in place so she could see them, but the ambulance workers brought her directly upstairs on a stretcher. I’d ordered a hospital bed and it was now in Nancy’s old room.
My mother was dying, but I didn’t know it then. She’d been in the process of dying in the nursing home, but I didn’t know that, either. Maybe doctors and nurses are so inured to death that they think what’s obvious to them is obvious to everyone. Maybe it’s like the Victorian figurines or the love in my father’s eyes. It’s visible and invisible.
I rubbed her feet for hours. “You have such healing hands,” she kept repeating. We drove to her favorite restaurant, Joe Fish, to bring back her much-loved tuna melt, but she ate only a few tiny bites. Nevertheless, I was sure she’d rebound. Nothing could keep my mother down for long. In a weak voice, she told me that the neighbors had a new beagle puppy. I think she was angling for me to write a children’s story about it. I told her I loved her and that I’d see her soon. Lee’s mother was being operated on for lung cancer the next morning and we needed to be back in New York.
Three days later, I received a call from Nancy telling me that she was heading to Andover. The nurse said my mother was ready for hospice. She was failing, and failing fast. I called Emily, but she told me that she and my mother had said their private good-byes the previous weekend. Lee and I raced back to Andover, but by then, my mother had lapsed into a coma.
My father held my mother’s hand. Nancy’s nine-year-old daughter Isabel sat across from her. She’d made her grandmother a special monogrammed pillow, which she nestled under my mother’s arm. Isabel hadn’t wanted to leave the room, even though Nancy was afraid it might be too upsetting for her. Later, I asked Isabel why she’d stayed. “Because I loved Nana,” she said simply.
Lee and my brother-in-law Mark stood at the foot of the bed. Nancy and I sat on either side of my mother and stroked her head. I’d read that hearing is the last sense to go. I don’t know if it’s true, but Nancy played a CD of the Irish tenor John McCormack, whose voice sounded exactly like Bumpa’s. As he sang Handel’s Panis Angelicus, my mother stirred slightly, took several big breaths, and then one long exhale. “She’s gone,” I heard the home-care attendant say. I immediately put my ear to her chest and listened to her heart. It beat four more times, and then a half beat, and then nothing.
My father wept openly. I’d never seen him shed a tear in his life and it was heartbreaking. The priest arrived to perform the Anointing of the Sick, and afterward the men from the funeral parlor removed my mother, who was now “the body.” They took her—“it”—down the stairs feetfirst. Nancy went into my mother’s bedroom to find clothes for the wake.
“What about the suit Mommy wore to my wedding?” she asked.
“Mommy wore black to your wedding?”
“Yeah, what’s wrong with that?”
“Oh, nothing . . . but it’s perfect for a wake.”
We searched the closet for shoes but could find only the New Balance sneakers. Perhaps she’d known her traveling days were over and had given most of her other shoes away. Nancy and I were frantic. My mother couldn’t wear sneakers with a suit.
“We can’t
find shoes,” Nancy told the funeral director, a sweet-faced man who projected quiet confidence.
“She doesn’t need them,” he said matter-of-factly.
She doesn’t need shoes? I thought of Paul walking barefoot on the Abbey Road cover. Was it a ritual I didn’t know about, something about entering the Kingdom of Heaven without shoes? But it was a more practical consideration. She didn’t need shoes because the coffin covered the lower part of her body.
“At least she needs pantyhose,” Nancy said.
“And my pillow,” Isabel added.
Thirty-nine years, twenty-seven days, and three hundred and sixty-nine minutes later, we were back at St. Augustine Cemetery in the snow. Except for the green carpet leading to the gravesite, practically everything was white—the flowers atop the casket, the trees glistening in the sun, the tops of the headstones, each a different size and shape. In another context and setting, my mother would have said, “It’s a winter wonderland.”
The priest recited prayers over the coffin. I remember the sprinkling of holy water, the sign of the cross, the phrase “Let perpetual light shine upon her.” I remember Warren and Woody’s sympathetic eyes; my father in the car too frail to make it up the hill; Lee’s hand touching my back; Nancy fighting back tears; Emily and her family opposite me. When it was over, we all walked back down the hill, Isabel in heels for the first time. They were black satin dotted with rhinestones and made her look very grown up.
“Isn’t she a little young for heels?” I whispered to Nancy.
“They’re better than the leopard combat boots she wanted to wear,” she said. “She’s become totally shoe crazy.”
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